'''Oleg Penkovsky''' was a colonel for [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] military intelligence ([[GRU]]) in the late [[1950s]] and early [[1960s]]. He apparently felt that [[Nikita Khrushchev]] was a dangerous thug who would lead the world to war. In [[1960]] and [[1961]] he wrote to various western individuals offering his services as a spy, which approaches were initially ignored by the [[CIA]] who thought he was a plant. He even approached some students on the Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960.
Eventually he persuaded [[Greville Wynne]] to arrange a meeting with British intelligence officers during a visit to [[London]] in 1961. Wynne became one of his couriers. For the following eighteen months he supplied a tremendous amount of information to his [[SIS]] handlers in [[Moscow]], [[Janet Chisholm|Ruari and Janet Chisholm]]. Most significantly, he was responsible for arming President [[John Fitzgerald Kennedy|Kennedy]] with the information that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was smaller than previously thought before and during the face-off with Khrushchev during the [[Cuban Missile Crisis]].
In [[1962]] he was arrested by the [[KGB]], and was tried and convicted of treason and espionage in [[1963]]. He was shot a few days after his conviction.
==Further reading==
JL Schecter and PS Deriabin, ''The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War'', NY, Scribner's, 1992
[[pl:Oleg Pieńkowski]]
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